Touchscreens are sometimes used in personal data assistants (PDAs), mobile phones, digital cameras, video recorders and other types of handheld electronic devices. Touchscreens may be implemented using one of many different touchscreen technologies including, but not limited to, resistive, capacitive, infrared and surface acoustic wave (SAW) touchscreen technology. Depending on the type of touchscreen technology which is implemented, a touch input may be activated by a finger, stylus or both. A stylus can be cumbersome to use, particularly when using only one hand. Accordingly, users often prefer to use their fingers to interact with a touchscreen device, particularly with capacitive touchscreen where the conductive touch of a finger or a conductively tipped stylus is used to generate a touch input on the touchscreen.
Touchscreens on handheld electronic devices may provide an intuitive user interface, however incorporating touchscreens into handheld electronic devices also poses challenges. One problem is the small amount of space on the touchscreen which is available to display information for user selection, particularly when using a finger to make selections on the touchscreen. The graphical user interfaces provided by applications and functions on handheld electronic devices often feature small interactive user interface elements (such as small icons, virtual keys of virtual keyboard, menu list elements and text) which may be difficult to select with a fingertip. In addition, interactive user interface elements are often situated in close proximity to each other making it difficult to detect the desired input selection.
Thus, there remains a need for improved input mechanisms for handheld electronic devices, and in particular an improved handheld electronic device having a touchscreen and an improved method of using a touchscreen of a handheld electronic device.
Like reference numerals are used in the drawings to denote like elements and features.